My Swedish passport has always felt a bit like a secret weapon. As a half-Swede who grew up in England, I have wielded it on countless occasions to get out of scrapes and escape judgement. As a national brand, it is almost beyond reproach — you flash your passport and sail through customs in countries from Israel to Sudan, greeted by special smiles of welcome like a visiting dignitary. Survey after survey confirms the same thing: everybody loves the Swedes.
Politically, the Swedes have long served as pin-ups for both the Left and Right. Bernie Sanders makes constant reference to Sweden as a model for his brand of ‘democratic socialism’, while David Cameron used to regularly seek inspiration from his Swedish counterparts on ideas as diverse as free schools, the Big Society and doing away with inheritance tax. More recently, the Right has invoked Swedish concerns about mass immigration as proof that it’s not only baddies who worry about that issue. Whatever your politics, if the Swedes are doing it, it must be OK.
Suddenly, in its response to the Coronavirus, the behaviour of my mother country is not meeting with the usual chorus of approval. By taking a radically different approach, have the Swedes finally lost their famed good sense… or should the rest of the world once again be looking to their example?
The coronavirus epidemic in Sweden — with 10 million population — is already relatively advanced: 3,500 certified infected and over 100 dead. But the Government refuses to ‘lock down’ the country as a response to the virus. They are following something closer to the ‘mitigation’ strategy that Boris Johnson’s government initially seemed to favour, before the sudden pivot to ‘suppression’.
Today, Sweden stands alone in Europe. Schools remain open (except for over 16s and universities, which are judged to function well remotely and don’t take key workers out of circulation) restaurants and bars are open (although only for table service to avoid throngs gathering at the bar). Gatherings of up to 50 people are still allowed, and there is much discussion over whether families all over Sweden should travel North for their annual Easter skiing trips at resorts in the mountains — all open for business as usual.
In theory, the difference in approach is a technical one: the Swedish scientists simply take a different view. The Swedish strategy is being led by ‘State Epidemiologist’ Anders Tegnell, who rather like Messrs Whitty and Vallance in the UK, has become something of a national leader and is on the television every day. The public health authority which he represents has released detailed modelling on a region-by-region basis that comes to much less pessimistic conclusions in terms of hospitalisations and deaths per thousand infections than the infamous study by Imperial College, about which Tegnell is vocally sceptical. “It’s not a peer-reviewed paper,” he has said. “It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.”
Sweden’s number of hospital beds per thousand is the lowest in Europe (the UK is the second lowest), but despite this, Tegnell has identified a number of factors that he thinks make Sweden well placed for the coming epidemic. The number of multi-generational households is very low, compared to say Italy, slowing transmission to the more vulnerable older generation; there is a large geographical spread of the population; and there is an observable tendency for Swedish people to follow advice, rather than need legal imperatives to do so. Families have been advised to avoid visiting older relatives where possible and urged to work from home if they can. It’s roughly Boris Johnson, circa three weeks ago.
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